Jeff Djevdet (cc)

Errors in business happen, but when you take the wrong direction — even in good faith — that makes customers feel deceived, you risk to never see them again.

Hurting customers may risk you business and reputation, but every error can be amended if you work hard on earning your customers’ trust back.

How? Here is the guide.

What To Do To Win Your Customers Back

Get in touch with your customers and announce a change in business ethics

Quinn Dombrowski (cc)

When it’s your business ethics to bring trouble — for example, you shipped your products for a fee when you stated it would be free shipping, or you use a cheaper shipping method when customer paid for a more expensive one — your whole customer base is affected, even though only a few of your customers were hurt by your practices.

What you can do in this case is to change your business ethics, announce it publicly on your website and get in touch with all customers via newsletter, offer an apology for your past bad practices and explain how exactly you are going to implement the new practices.

Offer your hurt customers ways you can fix the issue you created

If the problem involved individual customers, contact them to apologize and offer them to fix the issues you created, either intentionally or not.

You may add an apology bonus, like a discount, a gift or a custom order.

Apologize personally if you can

Email customers individually to offer personal apologies. Even better if you can do it via phone or in person.

Don’t underestimate the power of the human touch — customers who feel they are cared for are more likely to stick to a brand than customers who feel like they’re just a number in your database.

In addition to personal apology, make it public if the issue affected a big slice of your customer base.

Discontinue the hurting practices

Whether you get in touch with your customers or not, by all means stop doing anything that hurts them.

Not doing so may create a negative image around your brand and risk you business in the long run.

Work on practices that will meet the favor of your customers (new and old)

What do your customers want? When are they happiest? What past initiatives, practices or messages did create the most content in your client base?

Ask yourself questions. Analyze your data. Do more of what your current customers love and create more products or services on the same line to attract new buyers or users.

Whenever a controversy is raised, work to fix it immediately and always leave an open channel with your client base.

Ultimately, when you do wrong, all you can do is take responsibility and fix all the fixable.

If the customer is still unhappy for personal reasons, that’s something that doesn’t involve you — it’s a simple matter of likes and dislikes and you can do nothing about it.

For more discussion and ideas:

• 3 Ways to Win Back Unhappy Customers by Karl Walinskas
• How to Win Back Lost Customers by Dave Mattson

Have you ever seen controversy raise in your relationship with your customers? How did you fix it?

Share your wisdom and experience in the comments below.

The post Business Failures? How To Win Customers Back first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Are you still wondering what domain extension to choose for your new blog or your new project?

Registrars tend to stress the benefits of a certain TLD over another in terms of SEO, but should you listen to that advice?

Actually, NO. There are plenty of myths around the role of TLDs and domain names in SEO and I wrote this post to dispel the most known and talked to help you make informed decisions and avoid damage to your branding and SEO.

TLD Doesn’t Make Ranking

It has been debated over and over in the years, but Google has always denied any benefits of a certain TLD over another in terms of SEO.

Last time it was in July 2015, when John Mueller said on Google+ to clear any doubts and misconceptions: “if you spot a domain name on a new TLD that you really like, you’re keen on using it for longer, and understand there’s no magical SEO bonus, then go for it.”

Also, on the Google blog, Mueller adds:

Q: Will a .BRAND TLD be given any more or less weight than a .com?
A: No. Those TLDs will be treated the same as a other gTLDs. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way we crawl, index, or rank URLs.

Your chosen TLD won’t make or miss any future Google rankings for your website. What it really takes for you to rank is to work smart on your content, marketing and networking efforts.

As Neil Patel says in his blog, “The major factor in whether TLDs have an effect on SEO is whether the domain contains keywords. Of course, you and I know that Exact Match Domain names risk getting penalized.”

What really makes the difference, indeed, is keywords in your domain name, regardless of extension. In fact, Google has been penalizing EMDs (exact match domains) since 2012, so you should by all means avoid exact keyword domain names (like cheap-payday-loans.com) and instead focus on branding (think google.com, walmart.com, etc.).

When Does A TLD Count?

The problem may arise when certain TLDs — as well as certain IPs — are blacklisted or look suspicious because of spamming (mostly email spam), but in general the domain extension of your site does not play major role in your SEO efforts. gTLDs and the new TLDs are no exception. As long as you play it white hat and don’t spam, you’re fine to go.

Ensure that your site is on an IP that is not associated with spam and thus is not blacklisted. You can use WhatIsMyIPAddress.com to find out if your site IP is blacklisted.

Beware of free TLDs, however — because these have been massively used for spam and infection (like CO.CC and CZ.CC), Google has these in blacklist so your website would never get a chance to rank. Always research news about your chosen free TLD to see if it makes a viable choice while you wait to buy standard TLD.

The post Are TLDs Really Relevant for SEO? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s a tough nut to crack for bloggers, businesses and brand managers.

Online reputation is totally outside of control — it’s in the reader’s and customer’s hands, they can push a company to the highest ranks or lead it to sink, online and offline.

But does it have to be so tragic? Is reputation really something you can’t do anything about and you should just bear with?

“You should never underestimate the cost of a poor reputation,” Cheryl Conner wrote at Forbes last March, reporting an interview with Don Sorrensen of BigBlueRobot.com, “For example, Sorensen notes he once consulted with a company that had a severe online reputation problem. When potential customers searched the company’s name, 7 of the top 10 Google results were negative. After careful review of their rankings and prior-year revenues, he estimated the venture was losing nearly $2 million a year in sales because of negative search engine results.”

I feel that Dan’s most important contribution to Cheryl’s interview is this question:

“Why are people saying bad things about us on the Internet?”

Finding this out is exactly where it can go from tragic to enlightening and where you can do something to keep your brand’s reputation at its best no matter the hiccups.

Managing Online Reputation? Absolutely Possible (In Practice)

Here is a short checklist to guide you in online reputation management.

1. Check social comments

• Are there users who speak with hatred about the company?
• Are there some who could be considered fans or influencers?
• Do positive or negative comments attract the most reactions from the following? If so, in what ratio?

Social media can offer plenty of elements to assess your company’s reputation and what elements to work on, so don’t ignore them.

Respond to users who share negative feelings about your blog or company, reassure them and offer to help them. Get in touch with fans and influencers to show your appreciation of their efforts. Join user discussions on social media and forums and offer advice and clarifications wherever needed.

2. Check personal reputation of executives and important people in your business

Your reputation or that of people working under you in executive roles or any other public roles does count in business.

A scandal hitting you personally or one of your subordinates may hinder the image users or customers have about your brand — brand and person association happens and it’s difficult to erase. Also, it is a time-consuming process.

Make sure to talk to your subordinates and collaborators about their public image and to keep private things private wherever possible. See tip #6 in this checklist.

3. Check search engine results

Website mentions and backlinks, and the context surrounding them, are important factors for your business reputation.

Is the context positive or negative? Is it a news article, an opinion piece or a review? Are there comments or reactions to the content piece? If there’s any, does it favor your brand or not?

Reputation also depends on the authority of the linking or citing source: the higher the authority, the heavier the weight of the opinion for your brand’s overall reputation.

4. Tackle ethics and quality issues as soon as they arise

Don’t wait for discontent and disappointment to sink in and create damage in your brand image: if you or your team committed a mistake that lead users or customers astray and created discontent, act promptly to fix the issue and restore the image.

Also, make sure these issues are appropriately addressed in the media, especially on the company blog. Respond to interviews and explain what you did to fix any temporary ethics or quality issues.

5. Check review sites (like Yelp) and respond to reviewers — kindly

Review-centered websites like Yelp or Amazon make it actually easy to manage your company’s online reputation.

Take some time every week or two weeks to read reviews and respond to them. Thank reviewers for the time spent to leave feedback and let them know about your latest discount or another offer they might be interested in. Also, let them know how helpful their feedback is for your efforts to improve your offerings and how you communicate with users or customers.

6. Keep private things private (and work for it)

Read what Susan Adams says in her article at Forbes. It’s easy to tell too much online, to show too much, but when you have a business image to protect, you will want to be moderate in how you speak and behave in public and avoid all those situations that will put your persona and your business in trouble.

Also, make sure anything you put out for public view outranks and outnumbers anything negative other people (or even you, inadvertently) put out before.

What A Business Owner Says…

David Leonhardt, president at THGM Writers, agreed to share 3 tips with me about how to manage a business’ online reputation:

The post How To Manage A Company’s Online Reputation first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

SEO via Compfight

It must have sounded like a nightmare when Facebook announced they would no longer promote Business pages in newsfeed as they used to and that they would aggressively fight newsfeed spam.

Reminds you of Google, doesn’t it?

It does. Facebook has a wide user base and it has received many user complaints about how businesses clutter the newsfeed with spam, so Facebook just reacted to protect its users.

However, that doesn’t mean Facebook business pages are doomed. Promotion simply needs to be handled differently.

Here’s how.

Tag Users and Pages In Your Posts

Every time you publish and share your content, make sure you tag mentioned experts, interviewees and cited blogger in your posts.

In fact, most of these people will have a business page for their website or at least a personal Facebook profile, so they will see your tag and possibly engage with you on your post, either by commenting or by liking or sharing your post (even better if they share, because there are higher chances for your content to go viral!).

Promote Your Content In Facebook Groups

There are several Facebook groups that are niche or industry specific and allow members to share their content with the community.

Stick to guidelines, though! Don’t let admins catch you spamming or you’re out of the group and you might be reported as a spammer to the Facebook staff as well.

Ask Your Friends To Share Your Posts On Their Profiles and Groups

You can ask your Facebook Friends to share your content on their profiles, groups and pages, but you will have to respect their editorial decision to actually help you with the promotion or not.

Ask privately, possibly outside of the Facebook platform (so, not even private messages) to avoid possible spam reports.

Remember that Facebook now actively fights share- and like-bait.

Your Personal Profile Helps

You can share your business page posts on your personal Facebook profile and get more engagement that way, because not all of your Friends will be following your business page, but certainly all or almost all of them will follow your personal account in Newsfeed.

However, keep in mind that your profile followers may have different interests than your target audience for your business, so personalize your posts comment to this different audience when you share them.

Promote Your Facebook Business Page Offline and In Print

Add a link to your Facebook page on your business cards, posters, flyers, conference slides and wherever you see brand communications fit.

While people are more sensitive to online marketing and tend to be wary of promotional messages, offline and print promotions are still seen as less threatening and you can leverage this psychological aspect to spread the word about your business page.

Leverage Your List

Every business runs an email list for their most loyal clients or fans.

Share your Facebook-only offers and links with your list. They will respond willingly as getting interesting content and offers is part of why they joined your list.

How do YOU handle Facebook business page promotion?

More Ideas to Get The Most Out Of Your Facebook Business Page:

• How to Leverage Facebook for Business Marketing by Kabbage Team
• Should I Have A Facebook Page For Business Or Just Use My Personal Profile? by Josh Steimle at Forbes

The post How To Get The Most Out Of Your Facebook Business Page first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Even more controversial after the mass penalty on MyBlogGuest.com and the “all nofollow” reaction from eConsultancy that followed. Guest blogging really seems like a gray area to find your marketing and link building efforts in right now.

But it’s a question everybody keeps asking: “Does guest blogging still help with SEO?”

The answer is neither yes or no, but actually slightly more complicated.

I got two writers to share their ideas for this post. Their insight makes it clear that things have changed, but not so much to the smart (and honest) business.

Read on and take away.

Guest Blogging Doesn’t Help With SEO Rankings As It Used To…

Deborah Anderson from Social Web Cafe recalls when it was easier to rank with guest blogging and why it doesn’t work as it used to:

Previously, there was some SEO benefit with guest blogging because of the “dofollow” links.  Of course, there is no such thing as a dofollow link.  What it really is is the absence of the “nofollow” rel tag connected to the link.  This told Google to follow the link (dofollow) and that provided SEO benefit.

What happened is that some people were putting up very inferior “crap” articles and the search results (SERPs) were reflecting poor quality content.  Therefore, Google singlehandedly put a stop to that benefit, to stop people from putting up poor quality articles only for the purpose of the SEO benefit.  That move hurt the rest of us who didn’t mind the SEO benefit but were guest blogging for the other benefits.

What I just described is the direct benefit.  The indirect benefits of guest blogging still exist.  Those include branding, exposure, building the writing portfolio, networking, etc.  Also, there are some sites that do not use the nofollow tag (in other words, dofollow), but those are becoming fewer and fewer.  What happened back in March of 2014, to MyBlogGuest’s clients (basically all of them) resulted in everyone changing their links, site-wide, to nofollow.  Those who did not remained under penalty from Google.  That caused other sites to also change their links to nofollow so that they would not be penalized by Google.

It was a brilliant move by Google, to inflict fear across the globe, for publishers and writers on the Internet.  In one fell swoop they were able to make a statement about the type of content they want to show in their search engine.  We, as consumers of Google products, are to blame, as well, because we gave them the power to be the top dog for search.   And, what can I say.  I love their calendar and I am the “hangout queen” using the Google hangout product.

There are still indirect SEO benefits to guest blogging (i.e. a viral article that happens to do well in the search rankings), but it is not the SEO benefit that it used to be a couple of years ago.  If you are a writer, your best bet is to write for other reasons and then count the SEO benefits as icing on the cake.  If you are a publisher, your best bet is to nofollow the links that are contained in the guest articles that you receive.

It follows that guest blogging as a way to build links and help with SEO is no longer a viable strategy, even though guest blogging always helped and still helps with your branding efforts and it definitely helps to pull links from the Web in indirect ways, like Deborah suggests, which the next paragraph is all about.

BUT You Can Still Guest Blog To Indirectly Help Your SEO Rankings

Not all is lost with the “guest blogging penalty”. Here is what David Leonhardt from THGM Ghostwriter Service has to say about it:

Anything that spreads your name is good for SEO.  Every time you put your name out there, there is a greater chance that people will look for your website, find something they really like and link to it or share it on social media, and that’s good for SEO.

If there is a hyperlink, even a NoFollow one, that serves the same purpose.  If the link is DoFollow, even better.

The value of guest blogging for SEO depends greatly on the quality of the content on your website.  If lots of people read your amazing guest post, then rush to see what’s on your website, only to ding boring stuff, forget earning links and social shares from them.

When you get nofollow links to your blog posts and articles, users will still find them and link back to them as helpful resources in their posts (editorially) if they deem your content trustworthy and authoritative. That is what I do here at Bosmol as a writer anytime I stumble upon an amazing resource that fits into a post I’m writing— I go ahead and link it, whether that link was originally nofollowed or not.

Continue to guest blog and let users find you, if not search engines. In the end, like the say “all chickens come home to roost”, you will still get backlinks that are beneficial for your SEO efforts.

Do YOU guest blog? Has your opinion of guest blogging changed over time or are you still a fan?

Share in the comments below.

The post Does Guest Blogging Help With SEO Rankings? first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Problem:

Their problem was that they had a relatively new website, with little traffic and exposure.  The wanted us to come in and optimize their website and brand their company on the internet to make it easy for users to find.

Solution:

Our solution was a six month project where we came in and made some significant changes to their website.  We began by researching and understanding their industry and their potential customers.  We wanted to get inside the company owners head to see what he envisioned.  From there we researched keywords that will best suit their website, targeting customers that are ready and willing to make a purchase.  Once the initial website analysis took place we began to make on-site optimization changes.  This means setting up analytic tracking tools, adding keyword rich content, changing the HTML, internal website linking structure, and adding new pages.  After all the pages were optimized we submitted the website to all the major search engines.  We waited until the site was SEO friendly before submitting to the search engines because we wanted to make a positive website impression to the search engine spiders.

After the on-site optimization was completed we began to make off-site optimization changes.  Starting off with local business searches and extensive link building we were able to properly optimize Hass Libre.  We built their inbound links through articles, press releases, directory submissions, forum posts, and more techniques.  We created a blog for Hass Libre to generate new content, inbound links, and to interact with their customers.  The blog was syndicated to the major site feeds, thus gaining even more exposure through each blog post.

We created a positive brand image through the social networking sites.  We set up accounts with the major networking sites and built a Facebook fan page, Twitter account, and LinkedIn profile.  These accounts let Hass Libre interact with others interested in the same industry.  We maintained a positive image throughout these sites and with their customers.  After a few months we were able to hand off the social networking accounts and the blog to Hass Libre to manage.  We taught them how to make status updates, new blog posts, and how to make them SEO friendly and keyword rich.

Outcome:

The final results are that Hass Libre dominates the search engines for competitive keywords in their niche such as “Eco-Friendly Clothing”, “Organic Clothing“, “Latin Grammy Gift Bags“, “Organic Clothing and Accessories”, and more!  As they continue to update their blog and social networking pages on a constant basis, they watch their traffic grow by at least 15% monthly.  Initially, the website traffic doubled within the first month and since then has continued growing.

Their return on investment turned out well!  They say an influx of new customers that they never could have expected.  They invested only a few thousand dollars and saw revenues that were triple this amount.

The post CASE STUDY: SEO Optimizers Improves Keyword Rankings and Traffic for Hass Libre first appeared on SEO Optimizers.

Everyone has seen the “Rip off Reports” about shady business on the web. Well anyone can post a Rip off Report about your company. These posts tend to rank high in the search engines because this is an authoritative site. This can be bad if your business has a rip off report rating. Now whenever someone searches for your company website, the negative report will show up on the search results, usually in the top three results. This is detrimental and can have huge consequences.

There are a number of other ways a negative report about your business can hurt you. What about a Better Business Bureau low rating, Yelp reviews, negative forum posts, Craig’s List posts, etc. all get indexed within the search engines quickly and tend to rank high. If these sites did not rank so high organically in the search engines then it would not be such a problem, but since they are authority sites they tend to dominate the organic search results.

The consequences of having negative reviews means that customers will be weary to shop from your store or to do business with you. They may even tell friends, family, or coworkers not to shop at your store due to a bad experience or negative reviews. Would you want to buy from a store without positive rankings? I think not. So why would anyone else on the web buy from a site that has received negative feedback.

A good way to check if your site has any negative reviews is to type in different variation of your website/ company name in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Scroll through the first three pages to see if anything bad sticks out. If something does, then you must take corrective action immediately to thwart these sites.

Now that you are aware of negative feedback and the impact it can have on your business you may be wondering what you can do to avoid this. The simplest and easiest solution is to personally manage any complaints against you company and ensure that angry customer problems are resolved. Unfortunately, sometimes this is not possible and the customer is angry and wants to do everything in their power to spread the word about your service. This means you have to fight back, by building or promoting existing pages for those specific keywords that are bringing up the negative feedback. You can create new sites and make sure they are tailored around specific keywords that bring up negative feedback about your site. Promote these new sites by building links and adding the new sites to directories and other authoritative websites. The other solution is to review the sites just below the negative feedback and try to push those sites up the rankings. Promoting and building back links to these sites can achieve this. In time these sites will surpass the negative results and dominate the search results.

These methods should help remove any negative feedback or remarks about you or your company from showing up on the search results. Remember that this is an ongoing process and the negative feedback will start to reappear if you do not continue to monitor the new sites that replaced the negative feedback. This will show your customers that you truly care for them and will increase sales, revenue, and ultimately your business’s bottom line.

The post Remove Negative Feedback from Organic Search Engine Results first appeared on SEO Optimizers.